Epilogue 
THE RULEBREAKER
It’s no fun being nobody, not having enough money to enjoy life, being trapped. It’s wonderful to be somebody.
Barbara Walters had only started her journey on the road to being somebody when she made that declaration of intent in 1972. By then, she had managed to move from behind-the-scenes to on-the-air at NBC’s Today show, but other women had held a role on the show before. It would be two years before she was named the first female co-host of a network’s morning show, four years before she became the first female co-anchor of an evening news show, twenty-five years before she would create a daytime talk show that reinvented television conversation.
By then, there would be no denying she was somebody. No other woman had risen as high as she did in the world of TV news. No other person had done more to shape and rule what stands as its golden age. She redefined whose stories were considered worthy of telling and what questions they could be asked. She interviewed a wider range and a larger number of the world’s political leaders than anyone else, before or since, giving Americans a personal introduction even to despots and dictators. She had an impact on the country’s evolving culture, too, on the willingness to explore sensitive topics from rearing transgender kids to considering the afterlife. Her questions and the emotional reactions they often provoked—even an Army general with the moniker “Stormin’ Norman” cried when she asked about his father—helped open the door for the powerful to express their vulnerabilities in public.
In the process, Barbara earned the highest ratings in the business, commanded the attention of the country, and became one of the most famous faces on the globe. Over the decades, she appeared a dozen times on The Gallup Poll’s list of the most admired women of the year, in the company of Queen Elizabeth II and Mother Teresa.
Yet she never stopped battling journalism’s traditionalists—the “Capital J Journalists”—about whether she really belonged in their ranks. “Even though they’ve seen everything she’s done, they still don’t give her the gravitas,” Whoopi Goldberg told me, then corrected herself. “Women do. Men do not.” Over decades of proving herself, Barbara faced sexism, at first blatant and then more subtle. She got her first writing job in TV “mostly because she had a darling ass,” a CBS producer would recall. Even after she had achieved iconic status, Peter Jennings would at times be so slighting of her on the air when they co-anchored breaking news events that it sparked public comment. “Rude and peremptory,” columnist Liz Smith called his manner during coverage of O. J. Simpson’s two-hour car chase down Los Angeles freeways in 1994. Barbara was privately wounded by Saturday Night Live caricatures that mocked her speech, her mannerisms, the pronunciation of her name. She exulted in tributes from female journalists who followed her but also resented the easier path they walked because of the price she had paid.
“When I talk to the old guys in the business, they see her as someone who has cast-iron testicles, you know what I mean?” Bill Geddie, her longtime executive producer and co-creator of The View, told me. Those closest to her, though, said she was propelled not by her strength but by her uncertainties. “I think she woke up every day saying, ‘Have I done enough? Do they still like me? What do I have to do to extend this? How do I make this work?’ I think that’s who she really is.”
“While she could be dishy and funny and irreverent and all those wonderful things with her girlfriends, there was a hole that I think never got filled, an itch that never got scratched,” Cynthia McFadden, an ABC colleague and friend to Barbara, told me. “My standard line to her was, ‘If only you could appreciate your success as much as the rest of us have benefited from it.’ But she wasn’t able to.”
She was, oddly enough, afraid of heights. She was also the most driven person most of her friends and co-workers had ever met.
Her distant father, her disabled sister, her up-and-down childhood left Barbara feeling both responsible for her family and unsure whether she was up to the task. She remembered, like a scar that wouldn’t heal, the single sentence Lou Walters had written in his daughter’s college application for Sarah Lawrence. “Barbara is a very normal girl with normal interests,” he had said. What could be more impersonal? More dismissive?
She was nearly eighty years old and researching her memoir when she read the actual application for the first time. That nine-word sentence turned out to be the conclusion of a four-page evaluation by her father that was laced with warmth. She took “good interest” in her schoolwork, he said; he was proud of her “good work and good marks.” She was able to make “friends easily and hold them.” She read “a great deal” and was “literary-minded.” She had both “initiative and creative ability.” She had “no trait” that dismayed him and not “any bad habits.”
That was the sort of affectionate praise he had rarely expressed to her in person, feelings that she had never been entirely confident he held. It was as though she had discovered a sled labeled “Rosebud,” too late to make a difference. She had always assumed that his perfunctory assessment of her was “proof that he didn’t know me at all,” she wrote. “Reading now what he actually wrote, I realize that it’s quite the opposite—I didn’t know him.”
Despite her coiffed hair and society pals, Barbara Walters was at heart a rulebreaker, even a revolutionary. Sometimes she didn’t exactly break the rules; she simply ignored them, as though they couldn’t possibly apply to her. Women can’t do serious interviews? Just watch her. Reporters can’t hide in the bathroom at Camp David in hopes of landing an exclusive? Send out a search party. Seniors in their sixties and seventies and eighties should quietly step back and let the next generation grab the spotlight? Forget it.
At a time when ambition was seen as unladylike, Barbara plowed into a profession that wasn’t ready to welcome her. She ignored the edict that female voices didn’t sound authoritative enough to deliver the news, that female temperaments made women unsuited for the rigors of the highest ranks of the field. She dismissed any conflict about being interested not only in Washington but also in Hollywood—after all, wasn’t the audience intrigued by both?—and with that blurred the line between entertainment and news. To the tsk-tsking of the graybeards, she commanded higher salaries than any journalist had ever made, though their high-minded objections didn’t prevent them from demanding raises themselves. She became a brand.
She broke barriers not only as a woman but also as a woman who dared to age on the air, defying the expectation that while men gained authority, women became obsolete. (Admittedly, that defiance only went so far. Her hair got blonder as she aged, and her face remained remarkably free of wrinkles.) She was sixty-seven when she started The View, eighty-four when she finally relinquished her seat at the table.
“Without Barbara Walters there wouldn’t have been me—nor any other woman you see on evening, morning, and daily news,” Oprah Winfrey said when Barbara died, posting a photo on Instagram that showed younger versions of themselves sitting on a bench, arms around each other, smiling. At the audition for her first TV job in the 1970s, long before the two had met, Oprah consciously imitated the manner she had seen Barbara display on the Today show. “For the first year of my television career, I thought I was Barbara—Black,” she said. “I just had her in my mind, for inspiration.”
For decades, Barbara would be a role model for thousands of women, most of whom she would never meet. By the time she passed away, no network morning show would have dared field an all-male team of anchors. A woman, Norah O’Donnell, sat in Walter Cronkite’s chair at the CBS Evening News. A woman, Kim Godwin, was president of ABC News, and the first Black woman to lead a major network’s news division. Women were the head or co-head of NBC News, CBS News, and Fox News.
But seeing Barbara only as a groundbreaking woman in broadcasting underestimates her legacy. She was one of the most influential journalists of either gender in an industry that was just beginning to understand its possibilities when she got her first job. She is on the short list of those who have left the biggest imprints on television news, a group that also includes Edward R. Murrow, Mike Wallace, Walter Cronkite, Roone Arledge, Roger Ailes, and Oprah Winfrey.
“Barbara Walters is the patron saint of TV news,” said Steven D. Stark, author of a book exploring television’s impact on American culture. “For better or worse, she created what we now think of as television news.”
Achieving that distinction wasn’t free, and it didn’t happen by accident.
She divorced a trio of husbands and struggled with her only child from adolescence into adulthood, although they eventually made their peace. “I don’t think you can have it all,” Barbara said when daughter Jackie was twelve, saying the women’s movement had exaggerated the possibility of having both a demanding career and a rich personal life. “[I]f I am the epitome of the woman who has it all, let me tell you something. There are many things that tear me apart. I pay a price.”
After retirement, as she began to lose her mobility and her memory, she pushed away even many of her closest friends. For the final years of her life, she was tended to by her chief-of-staff and paid caretakers in her Fifth Avenue apartment, permitting few others to see her. After a lifetime of being at the center of almost everything, the solitude was poignant, the silence resounding.
“It would have been nice to have had several children, you know,” she said at age seventy-eight, looking back. Her daughter had rejected her entreaties to give her grandchildren. “It would be nice to have, you know, a marriage now in its 40th year. I mean, you’re asking me if I’m happy, yes, but you know, those are things I don’t have.”
She loved her job and savored her success. She exulted in the power and the praise, the multimillion-dollar fortune she had earned and the accolades she had won. But I asked dozens of her friends and colleagues a knottier question: Was she happy?
“I think she was very happy with many, many aspects of her life, including her career, motherhood, and strong, loving friendships,” Nancy Shevell McCartney, a second cousin so close that she came to consider Barbara a surrogate mother, told me. “Maybe for a minute, she thought to herself, ‘I should have a more domestic side to my life.’ But I think after that minute she realized that her life was complete and fulfilling.”
But most of the others I asked concluded, some reluctantly, that the answer was “no,” or at least not exactly “yes.” “Happy-ish,” suggested Joy Behar, the panelist on The View with the longest tenure. Not one described her as content. “She was essentially restless,” Diane Sawyer told me. “Happiness or not, I do think the restlessness kept her moving.”
“I didn’t know her to be happy,” said Ben Sherwood, a former president of ABC News. “I knew her to be hard-charging and driving and relentless and insatiable and unquenchable and indestructible.” But even after her biggest triumphs, her most celebrated interviews, she would seem to feel satisfaction only for a moment. “I knew her to be empty almost immediately afterwards, trying to figure out: How do we top that?”
Near the end of her career, she sometimes wondered whether it had all been worth it.
“What does being ‘Barbara Walters’ mean?” Oprah asked her in 2004.
“Sometimes it’s okay—and sometimes I can’t drive,” Barbara replied, a comment that may be more revealing than the non sequitur it seems to be. Sometimes it’s okay—and sometimes I can’t drive. She was shorthanding a comment Jackie had once made in describing her: “My mommy can’t cook. My mommy can’t drive. My mommy can only do television.” In more direct words, perhaps, she relished what “being Barbara Walters” meant, but she realized that she had missed out on some of life’s fundamentals. She had never learned to drive a car, or to sustain an intimate relationship. “Most of the time when I look back on what I’ve done, I think, ‘Did I do that?’ And you know what I say to myself? ‘Why didn’t I enjoy it more? Was I working too hard to see it?’ ”
She gestured toward the gallery of photographs in her apartment showing her with the most famous people in the world. “Look at all those pictures in the hallway,” she said. “Look at what I accomplished. Yet I was always on to the next thing.”
When she retired in 2014, ABC News named its headquarters after her, the building at 44 West 66th Street where she had worked for nearly four decades. (Nothing lasts forever: A decade later, ABC was poised to move to newly built Disney headquarters on Hudson Square, in lower Manhattan.) “I want to make something very clear, that each and every one of you, from the desk assistant to the producers to the correspondents and anchors, each of you who walk through these doors every day, yeah, my name is going to be on this building, but this building belongs to you,” she said during a ribbon-cutting ceremony that included Walt Disney Company CEO Bob Iger and Ben Sherwood, Diane Sawyer and George Stephanopoulos.
“The Barbara Walters Building,” the brass plaque declared, gold letters on a black background. “In recognition of Barbara Walters’ historic achievements and contributions to the fields of journalism and broadcasting for the past five decades.”
Still, she soon complained to a Variety reporter that the plaque was too small. “You have to really search to find it,” she told Ramin Setoodeh, demanding, “Tell me where it is. You don’t even know. I’m not being humble. I do not know where it is.”
The plaque may have been smaller than she wanted, but in fact it was in the middle of the main wall of the lobby, framed in gold and surrounded by photos of herself and the ABC stars who hadn’t had the building named after them. It was where every visitor had to pass, where it was impossible to miss. Where she was impossible to miss.